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Played on VisualBoyAdvance-M 2.1.9

I love Fusion, but as a Metroid-Vania, its linearity is only really surpassed by Other M. Sequence breaking opportunities are incredibly few and far between due to the restricted Bomb- and Wall-Jumping, and a lot of upgrades are locked behind the Screw Attack, the last Key Item you get in the game.

This hack fixes both of those things. Just removing the restrictions opens up /a lot/ of the upgrades for 'early' acquisition. Most notably, in my eyes, allowing you to get the Power Bombs, Plasma Beam and Space Jump the first time you enter Sector 2. Another is being able to get the Wide Beam the first time you enter Sector 3, which makes beating the bosses for the latter two items above much easier to collect. But this hack also replaces a bunch of non-essential Screw Attack Blocks, allowing for a couple of the arbitrarily endgame-locked items to be collected long before the vanilla game allowed you to do so. These combined allows you to get nearly 100% (I think around 97% in my last playthrough) of the upgrades before ever fighting Ridley-X if you know where to find them.

Interestingly, beating certain bosses and acquiring certain items out of order skips sections of the story entirely, allowing you to bypass many of the SA-X encounters, the Ridley Corpse scene, and immediately hunt down Nightmare-X once you get the Ice Missiles. This further cuts down on the run time of a playthrough, as you spend less time doing scripted fetch-quests and talking to ADAM.

I have heard there are a couple of softlocks, but so far I haven't personally encountered any. Which is probably more to do with my own lack of imagination than anything else. I have also heard that there a couple instances of locking you out of 100% item collection, but again, I haven't personally encountered that issue. Which, again, is probably more of a 'my skill' issue.

Overall, as the headline says, this has completely replaced Vanilla Fusion for me. This is /the definitive/ hack for this game as of the time of writing this. It is incredibly fun to speedrun this game now, and I don't think I can ever go back.

The sequence breaks do work, but I found the amount of them kind of small, especially considering the first one appears to be the power bombs in Sector 2. That's already a bit of vanilla gameplay to have to chug through.

I didn't have the "walking in place" issues others were complaining about. I played on windows mGBA 0.10.3. I'm unsure why I didn't have these issues while others did, but I'm glad I still got to beat the game.

A nice, time saving implement is that if you beat a later boss before you're supposed to, the game just skips right over their mission when it comes time. I beat the plant Chozo, Yakuza, and wide beam core X out of order, and did not need to revist those areas later. The Sector 3 meltdown did not happen, nor did the power outage. In fact, right after getting Ice Missiles in Sector 5, the game cut straight to the Nightmare mission since I had gotten all powerups up to that point.

The added "Unused content", afaik, is just two of the unused docking bay rooms, which both have an item in them.

It's a worthy experience (And fighting those bosses out of order can provide great challenge), but it's not a completely open Metroid Fusion if that's what you're looking for.

I have enjoyed this hack thoroughly and have already completed it multiple times. The ability to sequence break opens up this game and makes it so much more enjoyable. Early Power Bombs is a blast. If I can make one suggestion, the ability to press Start and skip the computer's dialogues would be much appreciated if possible.

So far I have only had one issue with this hack and sadly it is a major one. After clearing the Nightmare boss and absorbing the Core-X, Samus is stuck running in place and completely unable to move. I have seen other reviewers mention this so I suppose it can occur elsewhere, though I have never seen it up until now. For those of us who don't save, this is bad news as it completely kills the playthrough. Please fix if possible.

On the whole, this ROM hack is awesome! Just needs a few kinks ironed out.

Like others have already mentioned, most of the changes - both gameplay wise and aesthetically - are fantastic.

But there are a few bugs here and there, and the most grievous one is the one in the Omega Metroid fight at the very end. It ends up with Samus just running in place, stuck until attacked. Happens multiple times. If that, and some of the other things mentioned would be fixed, this would be an EASY recommend. But until then, the few bugs that are in there, are enough to seriously dampen the experience.

A pass, until further notice.

Some of the sequence breaks that are possible in this hack don't exactly work gameplay wise, and I'll elaborate on that.

The earliest you can get Power Bombs is in Sector 2 (TRO), you can also get the Plasma Beam here with the new single wall-jumping that was added to reach the area where the boss is located. Even the boss fight with the Nettori (Chozo statue with heavy vegetation) at this point is very do-able, a tough challenge, but with patience it can be done. Obtaining the Plasma Beam early works just fine too, all well implemented with a single shot since you don't have Wide Beam yet... More on that later.

Unfortunately that's where the positive things end for me. Once you proceed through the story up to where you're supposed to go to Sector 6 (NOC) to get the Varia suit, you can also go to the section where you would fight the B.O.X. for the 2nd time. You're not normally meant to reach this area yet until you unlock Security Level 4 much later in the game, but the author of the hack added a spot where you can Bomb and access that area. However, the fight was impossible.

The combination of not having Wide Beam, and not having Gravity Suit meant that when the B.O.X. shoots its missiles, your shots almost never line up to make contact and destroy the missiles and even if they do line up, they don't destroy the missiles in 1 hit. Basically, no matter what, during that fight I would always take damage from 1 missile at least. The area you're given to move around in is so small that dodging is incredibly difficult, even with the ceiling ladder. Trust me, staying up there doesn't work either.

Now as for not having the Gravity Suit. Let's say you managed to somehow destroy the B.O.X. and you're now on phase 2 where you fight the Wave Beam - Core X. The water severely hinders your movement and you CANNOT get away from the Core X as it gets near you, so you inevitably take a lot of damage over time and die. I attempted this boss many times, but it just could not be done. There needs to be something else there to make the fight do-able, or maybe the durability on the missiles could be reduced? Some sort of tweak here would definitely help.

Also, since the area you access where you fight the B.O.X. is a 1 way path the first time there. You're essentially soft-locked if you cannot defeat the B.O.X. to obtain the Wave Beam, to unlock a door from the other side of a room.

There are also many areas in the later parts of the game where if you don't have Space Jump, it makes getting out of big pits way more difficult than it needs to be (Sector 4 has an INCREDIBLY unforgiving pit if you fall down there without the Gravity Suit), sometimes there is no wall to single-wall jump from. I know Bomb Jumping is a thing now, but the implementation of the Bomb detonations seem... a little off? I can't seem to get a proper timing to the Bomb Jumps. It's definitely possible, I've done it, I just can't seem to get a consistent timing to it.

Overall, I still do recommend this hack. Just the fact that it looks good on the eyes, and that grabbing items out of order works is satisfyingly cool. But I was very excited to play Metroid Fusion and being able to sequence break without the game freaking out by order of events, and it ALMOST worked. I hope I'm not being too critical on the hack I certainly don't mean to sound negative on this either, but I do hope the author reads this and maybe thinks about perhaps adding an update on this.

I apologize if this review is too long, this is my first review on here. I played the hack and I really value the work they did and wanted to leave some honest feedback.

TL:DR

I loved everything this hack does. It honestly feels like the way this game was meant to be played. All of the features are executed just as described and it allows you to play the game in new ways without breaking it in the process. I played it on the hard mode myself and didn't find it too difficult, but still had to be careful at times, so a nice balance I'd say. That said..

I had a rather annoying bug happen multiple times. Before I state the bug, I'll give my setup for anyone that might be considering in case it's related to the cause:

• NTSC Gamecube with a GBP running the default software
• Everdrive GBA X5 with the latest firmware (1.15 at the time of writing)
• Using the Raphnet SNES GC controller adapter (Not sure if this is relevant, but figured I'd state it anyways)

As to the actual bug, essentially what happens is during moments that would cause Samus to move in a manner not done by the player, sometimes you can get stuck in a running animation that is impossible to stop doing. DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER TO AVOID SPOILERS!!!

My three instances of it happening were as follows:

• Charging the charge beam up as I grabbed the X parasite to obtain the gravity suit (forces you to stand in the middle suddenly for the suit change effect)

• During the Omega Metroid first appears and attacks, it triggered preventing me from absorbing the SA-X and continuing the fight

• During the Final Boss fight after "phase 1" during the actual fight, when the Omega Metroid attacked me and forces Samus to sit for a moment and manually stand up, I was did not fly back like I should have and instead instantly began running in place until the metroid eventually killed me. This specific trigger actually happened to me twice in a row. The Omega Metroid was able to claw me out of this lock somehow, which allowed me to finish the fight, but that was the only way.

In case anyone wants to see what I mean, I have attached a short clip of me showing the bug in action and also unplugging my controller to demonstrate it's not me doing it and is also impossible to unlock yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Kmpm8RKMvY

This is basically the same game, but with a bunch of quality of life improvements. Better colours and ambience. Slightly improved movement (jumping/walljump/bombs/etc). An absolutely FANTASTIC new map system!

For anyone planning to play or replay Metroid 4 (Fusion) before 5 (Dread) comes out, this is really the improved version everyone should play! :)

Just did a 100% in 4:10 and everything was perfect!

A huge thank you to the team who worked on this!